The count down continues..I am starting school in just over a month. I can't wait!
I have a question. I've never been one of those people to have test anxiety...I've always been very good at managing my study time, getting my work done early, and I've never been one to flip through the notebook, panicing, moments before the exam. When I imagine the academic part of my nursing student days, I feel pretty confident. I feel ready, and I know I can do it.
But then there are the clinicals. I imagine having to perform nursing procedures, about having to actually stick patients with IVs with a hovering professor or maybe even a group of classmates or critical, seasoned nurses, or bandage the patient, or anything, and I start to feel really nervous. I feel like I have performance anxiety!
As a side note, I haven't had any healthcare jobs before, not even small scale ones. I am essentially entering the nursing profession cold! Part of me knows it's crazy, but the rest of me doesn't care. i have decided that I am going to do this- wether or not I should go to school is not the issue.
I was talking to my friends about this- they think that I am just experiencing a "fear of failure", the idea being that I am about to do something new and, "like most people" they say to me, I am nervous about doing something that I have no experience in.
I just want to know if anybody can relate to this fear from before they started school, and what happened once they started clinicals. Does the anxiety go away once you get the hang of it? Am I just having pre-nurse jitters?
